Wednesday, September 16, 2015

This is the text of a talk I gave at a public event at St Andrew's Cathedral in Jackson, Mississippi this evening.

What an honor to be with you here tonight. I've flown in and out
of Jackson airport once before, and driven through the city several times over
the years, but this is my first opportunity to actually be in Jackson, and I'm grateful for it.

I'm actually going to begin by asking for a silent show of hands
on a couple of things. I want to see whether my intuition about these questions
is correct. How many of you have heard or said any of the following?

·Our
church is slowly dying. We've got to find a way to get more people through our
doors on Sundays.

·We're
losing our young people to the megachurch up the road because they have a rock
band providing their music.

·I don't
really go to church, but St Swithun's is the church I don't go to.

·Episcopal?
I've never heard of it? Which religion is that?

Sometimes I'm in a position—usually either getting a haircut on
donating blood—where somebody feels like they need to make conversation with me
by asking what I do for a living. Now, when I first began my ordained ministry,
back in the late 1980s, in south Louisiana, I would routinely answer, "I'm
an Episcopal priest," and that would pretty much work. But our culture has
changed; our society has changed. For anyone under the age of 40 or so, I no
longer have any confidence that they would even understand that
"Episcopalian" is one of an array of brand names by which Christians
sort themselves out. So I'll begin to answer that casual question by asking,
"Have you ever heard of the Episcopal Church," and if they answer
Yes, I'll explain that I'm the bishop who covers the Episcopal churches in
central and southern Illinois. But if I just get a blank stare, I'll fall back
to the British royal family and, you know, William and Kate's wedding in
Westminster Abbey. And if they smile and say, "Yeah, I saw that on
TV," then I'll say, "Well that's us. We're that church," and
then hope that the young woman cutting my hair isn't looking for a place to get
married and thinks that an Episcopal church will let her have potted trees in
the nave during the ceremony. But ... if I strike out on the royal wedding
question, I really have nowhere else to go. Short of going into a long and
technical explanation, which they're not really interested in, because they
were just trying to make conversation, I have no cultural footholds, no
societal grammar, that I can exploit to explain succinctly what I do for a
living. So sometimes I make a joke about “Episcopal” being an anagram of
“Pepsi Cola,” and leave it at that.

Now, I realize that, in the deep south, the evolution of our
society may not have gotten quite to that point. I'm given to understand that
there's still a fair amount of dressing up and showing up for church on Sunday
mornings in places like Mississippi. But that's only a reprieve, I’m here to
tell you, not a pardon. It's only a matter of time, and probably not very much
time, before church affiliation disappears as a routine assumption in southern culture,
just like it has in the rest of the country.

The fact is, I would bet that, even right here in Jackson, we
could all fan out from this cathedral church and knock on doors asking, True or
False: Easter is about Jesus walking out of his tomb, and if he sees his
shadow, that means six more weeks of winter ... and the majority would say
either True or "I don't know." Fifty or sixty years ago,
baptismal certificates were accepted as proof of age for purposes of school
registration. Churches and clergy were presumed to be pillars of our society,
strengthening the social fabric (and therefore deserving of tax breaks and
other courtesies). Now, clergy are presumptively shady characters, and
city councils and neighborhood associations consider churches to be leeches on
municipal infrastructure and the tax base, a drag on society rather than an
asset. Churches now have to compete with organized athletic and other events
for the attention of kids and families on Sunday morning.

What we are experiencing, my friends, is not just a natural
cycle, not just a pendulum swing. There is a mountain of evidence—still
growing—that we are well into a monumental sea-change, not an organic
evolution, but a tectonic shift of the sort that happens only every several
hundred years. I would argue that the change we are in the middle of will turn
out to be more significant than the Reformation of the 16th century. In fact,
we need to go back about 1,700 years, to the early 4th century, to find the
other bookend.

Christianity, as you know, began in an obscure corner of the
Roman Empire. But, precisely because of the Roman Empire, that area of the
world was largely at peace, and, by the standards of the time, there was an
excellent road system (a better road system, actually, than there would again
be in Europe until the 18th century). So Christianity spread rapidly, attracted
the attention of the authorities, and soon came under successive waves of
persecution, some of it deadly, that would continue for nearly 300 years. But
then, Constantine, the emperor, had a vision one night, and Christianity soon
became not only legal, but, within a generation, the official religion of the
Roman Empire. In the seventh century, Islam eclipsed much of the Christian
world, so the focus shifted to Europe. And, in Europe, for the next millennium
and a half, there was what came to be called the Constantinian synthesis,
“Christendom”—a hand-in-glove relationship between the church and secular
society. They might struggle over which was the hand and which was the glove,
but there was no argument over the close relationship. To be a citizen was to
be a Christian, and to be a Christian was to be a citizen.

But, beginning in the 18th century with an intellectual movement
called the Enlightenment, the Christendom started to slowly unravel. (One could
argue that it actually began in the Renaissance and the Reformation, but, in
any case, certainly by the Enlightenment.) In the final decades of the last
century, the process of unraveling picked up speed at an exponential rate. The
moorings linking western culture to Christianity have come completely
undone. Just as ancient paganism found itself engulfed by the rising tide
of Christianity, so now the last flickering of Christendom is being doused by
the rising tide of ... well, it's hard to say what, precisely, but I'll
offer—as a sort of placeholder—secularism and radical individualism,
particularly the latter. That's fast becoming the dominant, default
intellectual mindset of our culture. Some might want to call it post-modernity,
but the upshot is this: the expression, "It works for me," is our
society's slogan. Ideologies are evaluated according to their utility, and
utility is defined as whatever increases personal autonomy. The majority
opinion in the recent Supreme Court decision on marriage drinks deeply from
this well in the assumptions it makes about the nature and purpose of marriage.

So, as I see it, we—the is, the Christian community—have three
options as we assess the tsunami of "post-Christendom" that is
already engulfing us. First, we can deny that it's happening, and treat it as
just a phase that our culture is going through, and that everything will get
back to "normal" a few years from now, as a natural cycle plays
itself out. I might be surprised, but I doubt there's anyone here who would
take such a position. I certainly would not. Second, we can resolve to resist
it, to stand firm against the barbarians as they proceed with the sacking of
Rome. This is the tack taken by most of the so-called "religious
right," those who use language like "Let's take back our country for
God." I suppose this might result in minor victories in
"battles," but we will still lose the war. Finally, we have the
option of embracing the change that is already upon us, and seeing it
as the greatest missionary opportunity for the Church of Jesus Christ
since the Day of Pentecost. As you can probably tell, this is the response that
I advocate.

What would "embracing" the secularization of our
society look like? Well, for starters, it would look like something that the
working title of this talk alludes to: Please Don't Invite Your
Friends to the Eucharist. Now, that's an expression that is
intentionally provocative. I hope it makes you uncomfortable! I'm going to
unpack it a bit presently, but it's clearly meant to be a metaphor for a
rather thorough shift in attitude away from an "attractional" stance
toward mission and in the direction of an "apostolic" stance. In
other words, instead of focusing our attention and energy on trying to get
"them out their" to drive to our parking lots on Sunday mornings and
walk through our beautiful red doors and join "us in here" for
worship, we camp out in their neighborhoods, build
relationships around mutual interests, and earn the privilege of talking to
them about their ultimate concerns, whatever it is that keeps them up at night,
which is the context in which we can credibly introduce them to Jesus. That, my
friends, is a long way from business-as-usual for Episcopalians.

So I would
like to tell you a story to illustrate what I'm talking about. It's a story
that I shared with my diocese about four years ago. I believe it’s a true
story, though I can’t be certain because it takes place in the future. So,
we’ll see.

Anyway,
Lisa and Jeff live outside of Sharpstown in Jones County, Illinois—check me
out, there are no such place names in Illinois; the names had been changed to
protect the unsuspecting—about 14 miles from the county seat city of Pinehurst.
Jeff works in his father’s retail farm implement business, and will one day own
it; Lisa works in a local beauty parlor. They have two kids in high school,
which can get a little expensive, so a couple of years ago they found
themselves in nearly $50,000 of revolving credit card debt. It seemed that they
just weren’t very good at managing their finances. Through one of Lisa’s hairdressing
clients, they heard about a series of seminars being held down at the VFW Hall.
They were feeling just vulnerable enough that they were willing to accept help
from just about any direction, so they attended the meetings.

Doing so
not only turned their financial life around—now their debt is less than
$20,000, they’re living within their means, and they’re looking forward to
actually opening a savings account—not only is their financial life turned
around, but they made some new friends who were also part of the group. What
Lisa and Jeff learned about halfway through the financial management series was
that it was sponsored by St Gabriel’s Episcopal Church in Pinehurst. Lisa’s
client, in fact, the one who told her about the seminar, is a member of St
Gabriel’s.

Now,
Lisa’s parents were Methodists when they themselves were kids, and Jeff’s were Roman
Catholics. But neither Lisa nor Jeff ever had any experience with any church,
except for the occasional wedding or funeral, where the religious talk never
made any sense to them. But a couple of their new friends from the financial
seminar invited them to a come to a group meeting in their home, right
there in Sharpstown. There was some good food, good fellowship, some
conversation about the big issues of life, and always a short prayer at the
end, led by the host couple, Julie and Mark. Jeff and Lisa were a little skeptical
at first, but they really liked the people, and found that they enjoyed
exploring the spiritual dimension of their lives, which they had never really done
before.

After
about three months of coming to these week night home group meetings, there was
a special visitor. Julie introduced him as Father Cliff, the priest from St
Gabriel’s. Over dinner, Lisa and Jeff learned that Fr Cliff actually had a day
job as an administrator at Pinehurst High School, and took care of St Gabriel’s
in his “spare time.” At the discussion time, Fr Cliff informed the group that
he had rented the VFW Hall on every other Sunday night beginning the following
month, and wanted to know whether anyone in the group would be interested in
joining him for a simple service of worship and instruction—a little music,
some prayers, and a time of teaching about the basics of Christian faith, and,
of course, some food. For those who continued to be interested, this could lead
to baptism. On their way home that night, Jeff and Lisa agree that they would
begin to attend those services.

So they
do. And they find that they actually enjoy the experience. Much to their
surprise, they begin to pray, on their own, at home. Not too much, but some.
They also find that their relationship with their kids begins to be a little
less stormy, and is sometimes even a little sweet. Nobody knows quite why, but
both parents and kids are happy about it. The kids begin to join their parents
at the VFW Hall on Sunday nights.

This goes
on for a couple of years. The VFW Hall meetings are now held every week. Their
oldest child is now away at one of the state universities. It’s fall, and Fr
Cliff begins to gently raise the question: Who feels ready for baptism? By this
time, there are over 20 adults in the group, none of whom had any previous ties
to a church. To Fr Cliff’s delight, the response is, “We thought you’d never
ask!” So the instruction becomes a little more intense. They begin to read more
scripture in their worship. By this time, both Jeff and Lisa have each gotten
hold of a Bible for their own personal use, so they notice that the passages of
scripture that are read are not chosen randomly, but follow a pattern. Some
people from St Gabriel’s quietly begin to show up and assist Fr Cliff with the
teaching by leading small group discussions. New songs are introduced in their
worship—songs with unfamiliar language and vocabulary that the catechists need to
explain the meaning of—and the group is taught to give responses to various
things the leader might say.

At the
beginning of December (or, as the group is told, “Advent”), each of the
candidates for baptism is paired with a sponsor from St Gabriel’s, someone who
listens to them and prays for them and emails them and talks by phone at least
weekly. About ten weeks later, at the beginning of Lent (which Jeff remembers
his Catholic grandmother talking about, though he never knew what it was), the
20 candidates solemnly sign their names in a special book that has been
prepared for that purpose, as their sponsors vouch for the fact that they have
been faithful in attending worship and instruction, and have lived in the world
in a manner worthy of a follower of Jesus. Fr Cliff and the other catechists
begin to mention something called the Eucharist, though whatever they say about
it is kind of vague, and they never teach about it directly. But Jeff and Lisa
and their other friends get the distinct impression that it’s pretty important,
and that, after they are baptized, it will be a regular part of their
experience.

Then, on
the night before Easter, a bus appears in the VFW Hall parking lot, which takes
everyone to Pinehurst, and St Gabriel’s Church. They’re ushered into the back
of the church and given a hand candle. It’s very dark. A lot of scripture is
read, and the passages are very long. But the catechumens have heard them all
before. It is in these stories that the gospel has been explained to them: the
Creation, the Flood, Abraham’s Sacrifice of Isaac, the Exodus, the Valley of
the Dry Bones. Then their sponsors present them to Fr Cliff, who is dressed up
in a way they’ve never seen him before! He asks them if they renounce the ways
of this world, and if they promise to follow Jesus as Lord. Then the whole
congregation says the Apostles’ Creed with them and answers some more
questions. Then, one by one, Fr Cliff baptizes them, and pours oil over
them—generously—and tells them that they have been sealed by the Holy Spirit in
baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever. Then, for the first time, they give
and receive the Sign of Peace, and finally, are actively present as heaven and
earth are joined and death and life become indistinguishable from one another,
and they dine on the Body and Blood of him whose true members they have now
become.

The next
Sunday, they gather for the Eucharist once again, only this time back
in the familiar VFW Hall in Sharpstown. The Bishop is there, somebody they’ve
only heard rumors about until this point! He leads them in a discussion about
becoming their own Eucharistic Community, and, together, they decide on a name:
the Church of the Advent, Sharpstown. And so it goes.

I haven't described anything that I expect will take place
precisely as I have told it, so I hope you get the gist. And I'll also try and
tie things together here and now, in a more prosaic fashion. This will take the
form of five concluding points:

First, the Church we are becoming will no longer be supported by
the social structures we were once accustomed to and dependent on. These
include a presumptive respect for churches and for clergy, an expected seat at
the public policy table, non-taxable property, clergy income that is
tax-privileged ... you get the general direction.

Second, the Church we are becoming will no longer be able to
assume that those around them in society have a basic knowledge of the
Christian narrative that they absorb just by being part of the culture. I
want to add here that I consider this a supremely good thing, and pray for the
day to be hastened. The day we have some real blank slates to work with, rather
than people who think they know what Christianity is, but really don’t, and
have therefore rejected a cheap knockoff of the real thing—the sooner that day
arrives, our evangelistic task will get a whole lot easier.

Third, the Church we are becoming will be made up of committed,
well-formed, disciples who are ready to engage apostolic mission. You have to
be a disciple before you can be an apostle, so let's be about making more and
better disciples, shall we?

Fourth, in the Church we are becoming, the Eucharist will no
longer be our "front door," the entrance to the railway station, but,
rather, several stops down a line that includes connection, evangelization,
formation, and initiation (that is, baptism). [Incidentally, this will
render the current controversial conversation about offering Holy
Communion to the unbaptized completely moot, because, as we saw in the story
about Jeff and Lisa, people won't even see the
Eucharist until they are baptized.]

Finally, the Church we are becoming will not concern itself with
conforming to society and culture, or following society and culture, or gaining
the approval of society and culture—and still less with being on the so-called
"right side of history." Rather, we will be focused on being an alternative society
and culture, modeling in our own life together the values of the coming Kingdom
of God, and saying to the world, "If you want to know what's comin' down
the pike, look at us!"

It's an ambitious vision, I will grant you. It involves leap-frogging
over the last 1,700 years of Christendom and learning some "best
practices" from our forebears who knew how to be a church in a non-churchy
world. We can't replicate everything they did, of course—their context was
pre-Christian and ours is post-Christian—but there's an awful lot we can learn
from their experience. In the meantime, let's start building the infrastructure
that will relieve the Sunday Eucharist of a duty it was never designed to
perform—being our front door, our show window, to the world. Instead, in the
spirit of Eugene Peterson's translation of John 1:14, let's "move
into the neighborhood" and bring Jesus with us.

This is the text of an address I made to a group of clergy leaders in the Diocese of Mississippi yesterday. The gathering, summoned by Bishop Brian Seage, was intentionally inclusive of both positions in the current debates around sexuality and marriage.

It's a joy to be with you this morning. I want to especially
thank George Woodliff and Bishop Seage for the invitation. Even though I have a
DEPO relationship with Trinity in Yazoo City, and have had a couple of visits
there, Mississippi is still pretty exotic territory for this midwestern boy
who's lived most of his adult life on the west coast. Although, my mother was
raised in Arkansas, and I passed five pretty happy years in south Louisiana, so
I'm not completely naive when it comes to the south.

I'm going to get started by just acknowledging and naming the
elephant in the room, pretty much so I can earn the privilege of not talking
about it directly. We're here, ultimately, because we as a culture, and we as
the Anglican Communion, and we as the Episcopal Church, and you all as the
ordained leaders of the Diocese of Mississippi, have developed quite a case of
acid reflux over issues of sexuality and marriage. There are transcendently
significant and important matters at stake, we all seem to believe—for some, a
pretty clear gospel imperative of justice and human dignity; for others, a
pretty clear gospel imperative of fidelity to the witness of sacred
scripture and the testimony of the generations of Christians that have
exercised stewardship of the Good News of Jesus before the baton was handed off
to us. Now, as I've said, in my remarks right now, I'm not going to address the
issue of sexuality and marriage. However, this is not by any means an effort to
"talk around" or otherwise evade a difficult subject, but, rather, to
"talk under" it, to dig down to the roots of of our intellectual
habits and our theological assumptions, the taproots and wellsprings that eventually
inform and shape the various places where we stand, politically and
strategically and emotionally and spiritually, in regard to the elephant in the
room.

The working title of my talk is Looking to the Rock from Which You Were Hewn: Soundings in Revelation
and Authority. The first part, you may realize, comes from Isaiah 51:1
"Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness, you who seek the LORD: look
to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were
dug." My hope is that my reason for choosing that particular snippet of
scripture will become self-evident by the time I'm finished.

Please indulge me, first, a small bit of autobiographical
detritus, if you will. I do this not to be narcissistic or spiritually
exhibitionistic, but simply to be efficient. Telling some of my own story
simply seems to quickest way to get to the nugget of what I want to leave you
with, to stimulate your thinking with.

I am not a cradle Episcopalian. I was raised in the western
suburbs of Chicago, in the figurative shadow of the iconic Wheaton College, in
a free-church evangelical environment that had a Baptist accent. It was
imprinted on me at a very early age that all doctrine is derived from
Scripture, and Scripture alone. If you can't back it up with the Bible, then
don't bother even saying it. However, I don't recall ever being offered very
much by way of a coherent, disciplined, and consistent hermeneutical eye
through which to read the pages of the Bible. Simply by the absence of anything
more robust, we were left with a very loose and hyper-individualistic
hermeneutical approach. Scripture means pretty much whatever you think it means
after praying about it sincerely. It's a good idea to talk to the pastor, or
one of the elders, of course, but, bottom line, it's between you and the Holy
Spirit.

When it came time to choose a college, I wanted to go to a
Christian college that could be called by any name except Wheaton, because, you
know, familiarity breeds contempt. So I ended up at what some refer to as
"the Wheaton of the west," that is, Westmont College in Santa
Barbara, California. Westmont was then and remains now in the center of the
very tradition in which I was raised, the culture of free-church
evangelicalism. Yet, while there, and as an overt result of being there—though
I'm not sure it was necessarily by Westmont's design—I encountered something
much wider. I encountered Catholicism. I encountered the broad mainstream of
historic Christianity. The primary way I discovered Catholicism was by majoring
in music and being required to study music history, and, in that context, being
required to learn a good bit about the historic western Catholic liturgy. To
pass tests, I had to know the meaning of such terms as Kyrie, Credo, Gradual,
Motet, Anthem, Agnus Dei, and the like. At first, I was suspicious of it all
as, you know, too Catholic. In time, however, the direction of my suspicion was
reversed, and I began to see cracks in both the worship and the theology of the
tradition in which I had been formed. Now, I also took a required one-semester
course in Christian doctrine during my junior year, and, in that course, I was
exposed to the debates about Christology and the Trinity in the first four
centuries, and to the various councils and creeds that grew out of those
debates. Without realizing it, I was developing a biblical hermeneutic that was
a little more sophisticated than just “whatever seems good to the Holy Spirit
and to me” ... at the moment.

In the spring of my junior year, I was corresponding—yes, by
good old-fashioned snail mail—with a church friend from my high school years
who was attending one of the other "not-Wheaton" institutions, a
place in Deerfield, Illinois that now goes by Trinity University. I was
beginning to share with him some of the journey I was on by way of discovering
creeds and liturgy and sacraments and all that good stuff. The subject of the
Eucharist came up, and my friend said, in a way that would be utterly natural
and predictable given how we were both raised, "I haven't yet thought
through my view of communion." My view of
communion. Now, I should add, just by way of some context, that, about a year
before this exchange of letters, I'd been through a bit of a dark night of the
soul. I knew that, as a Christian disciple, it was my duty to be ready to bear
witness to Jesus, and to my faith in him, to anyone who asked, at pretty much a
moment's notice. But I despaired of ever being able to do so, almost to the
point of tears, because I had not "thought through my theology of” … anything! So I felt like I could
never be either a credible or an effective witness to the gospel until I was
able to write my own multi-volume systematic theology—you know, to channel my
inner Thomas Aquinas! And so, here I was, post-crisis, carrying on this
correspondence with my friend, and seeing his words "my view of
communion," and smacking my head and saying to him—only, actually, just to
myself—"What the hell are you thinking?! What does your view of communion have to do with anything?"

In that moment, I think I realized, at least subconsciously,
that I had turned a hugely important corner. I had become a Catholic Christian.
It was still three years before I would come under the hands of the Bishop of Los
Angeles in Confirmation, but there was no turning back. I realized that
I don't have to develop my theology of anything!
It is so blessedly not about me that I can exhale and let go of the burden.
Why? Because the Church is the steward of Christian doctrine, and my only job
is to gratefully receive the Church's doctrine through paradosis—the Greek behind the word
"tradition," and evoking the image of a baton being passed from one
runner to the next in a relay race. Being a Christian disciple is not about
developing my own multi-volume systematic theology. It's about remembering
the rock from which I was hewn, the quarry from which I was dug.

So now, moving in the direction wrapping things up for the time
beings, I'm going to lay down six markers that I believe flow naturally and
consequently from the foundation that I hope I have just laid by means of that
little vignette from my young adulthood.

First, this: For a Christian, the resurrection of Jesus from the
dead is the unavoidable fundamental data point of any and all theological discourse
and speculation. One of my favorite quotes is from the Lutheran theologian
Robert Jenson, who, in his systematic theology, defines God this way: "God
is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having first raised Israel from
Egypt." Let that sink in for a bit. I suspect it's fairly
non-controversial among those in this room, and I don't mean to belabor the
obvious. But it underlies what comes next, so I needed to get it out there.
Theology—including, ultimately, the theology of marriage—flows from Christology,
and Christology begins, not in the pre-existence of the logos, or in the incarnation, or in the teaching or
healing ministry of Jesus, or even at the cross, but at the empty tomb, with
the phenomenological manifestation of a sovereign, revelatory, act of God, on
God's own initiative, in the time and place of God's own choosing.

Second, and therefore, revelation is the "operating
system" of all Christian theology. Think with me about the difference
between your computer or your smart phone's operating system and the actual
applications that you use on your computer or smart phone or tablet. The
operating system may not often call attention to itself—in fact, I hope it seldom calls attention to itself
(which is why I switched from Windows to Mac!), but if you try to run an app—like
check your email or access your calendar or compose a document—and there are
kinks in your operating system, you will not have a very happy day. Similarly,
you may not think consciously about the details of God's self-disclosure, God's
self-revelation, as you try to parse a difficult pastoral or ethical issue. But
if you try to do theology outside the context of revelation, the
"app" will fail. Human beings do not and cannot intuit or find
God. We would know nothing of God's character or how we as human beings fit
into the design and meaning of creation apart from God's voluntary and
unilateral self-disclosure. We cannot pretend to discern the mind of God or the
will of God on any question that might vex us without attending carefully to
what God has already disclosed on the subject.

Third, it is the whole Church—the
Church Catholic, across not only space but time—that is the steward of God's
revelatory self-disclosure. No fragment of a Church that is simultaneously one
and divided can trump or bully the other fragments with its own idiosyncratic
understanding of what Christians should believe or how Christians should live.
We see God's revelation clearly only when we see it together. This revelation
that we see together is primarily located in sacred scripture—those
documents that ordinands in the Episcopal Church are required to publicly
affirm as "the word of God." And I would suggest that the Anglican
tradition also holds up and affirms the historic creeds and councils of the
undivided church as inescapable touchstones for understanding the revelation of
God. At the very minimum, four of these ecumenical councils are on the
canonical list, but, as a card-carrying Anglo-Catholic who is the bishop of a
biretta-belt diocese, I would be remiss if I did not remind you that the
correct answer is actually seven!

My fourth marker (out of six, I will reassure you): The
content of revelation must be rearticulated afresh for each
generation. Intellectual habits and categories, vocabulary, thought patterns,
cultural grammar, poetic sensibilities—all these things change and evolve, and
it is the Church's mission-driven responsibility to find new and compelling
ways by which to speak of the good news of Jesus and the revelation of God in
holy scripture and the sacred tradition of the Church. In doing so, however, we
do well to be mindful, and resist the constant subliminal attempts of
secular culture to hijack the content of Christian revelation
and exploit it for its own purposes.

Number five, and in close tandem with number four, the
content of God's revelation must be embraced afresh by each generation. So, it's the Church's job
to always find fresh articulations of revelation for each generation, but it's
each generation's responsibility to receive and come under the authority of
that revelation. No one has a license to reinvent the Christian
narrative, or custom-design it to suit any norms or assumptions that are
exterior to Christianity itself. We are stewards of and accountable to God's
revelation. As I discovered, to my great relief, as a college student, I don't
either have to have or get to have my theology
of anything. I receive what the Church hands on to me, which the Church, in
turn, has received from God.

Finally, number six: The Church's stewardship of revelation is
exercised in humble and patient communion. St Paul exhorts us, as he writes to
the Ephesians, to be eager to maintain "the unity of the Spirit in the
bond of peace." And when he writes to the Corinthians, he gently takes
them to task for their impatient and thoughtless behavior toward one another on
the occasions of fellowship meals: "When you come together to eat ... wait
for one another." This is not easy. Reaching consensus is a much more
daunting challenge than orchestrating a simple up-down majority vote. As
Americans, we are culturally conditioned to political processes that produce
up-down majority votes. That's certainly an efficient way to dispatch with a
mountain of pending business, and there's an apparent egalitarian fairness
about it. The rules are clear, and the process is relatively transparent. But
I'm not sure it's necessarily the most Christian way of going about the
Church's business, especially when core elements of the faith are at stake.
Rather, we are to wait for one another.

Well, I suspect that this should at least stimulate your
thinking and, hopefully, some discussion, so I'll quit here.

About Me

Daniel Hayden Martins, aka Dan (to my friends), Danny Boy (to some of my Brazilian relatives), Big Guy (to my kids and their friends), Bishop Daniel among those with whom I work, and probably some other aliases I'm not aware of. I'm an Anglican bishop, a Baby Boomer who was born in Brazil, raised in the Chicago suburbs (at the end of a runway at O'Hare), and has lived in both central and southern California, western Oregon, southeast Wisconsin, and south Louisiana. Married 43 years to Brenda, father of three fabulous grown children, and now serving the Diocese of Springfield (Episcopal Church).